Marie

“We're always drawn to the clearest articulation of what we think we lack.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, No One Tells You This

“That was really the question. Would I be okay without a child?

Each night I sat with [my infant nephew] Connor and forced myself to go down the path of imaginary motherhood, suspicious of myself that this would be something that I would be willing to reject. Every night I expected to have a change of heart and come up with a different, more recognizable answer. But it never happened.

Instead, sitting in the dark and quiet, something quite unexpected occurred. My life, precisely as it was--the product of good and bad decisions--began to come into focus for me. Sitting there, I could see it for the first time as something I'd chosen. Something I'd built intentionally, and not simply a makeshift thing I'd constructed as a for-the-time-being existence until something came along that would make me a whole person in the eyes of the world. Once I began to see it as such, it dawned on me that I had no wish to escape from it. On the contrary: I wanted it. I was choosing my life. I was willing to risk it.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, No One Tells You This

“I have never been more relieved than on the morning of my fortieth birthday...it felt like I'd been released.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, No One Tells You This

“This is why people have babies...because it's exhausting not to know what you're supposed to do next. A baby is basically a nonnegotiable map for the next two decades.”
― Glynnis MacNicol, No One Tells You This